October 26th, 2009
Noted author ZZ Packer to read at Porter House

STAFF REPORT

The Katherine Anne Porter House at 508 Center Street in Kyle will present a reading by ZZ Packer on Nov. 13 at 7:30 p.m.

The event is cosponsored by the Texas State University Department of English. The reading is free and open to the public.

Packer wrote Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, a highly lauded short story collection. The book was selected by Pulizter Prize winning author John Updike for the Today Show Book Club.

Packer graduated from Yale in 1994. She took her masters at John’s Hopkins and recieved her master of fine arts from the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. She was named Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University.

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere was a PEN/Faulkner finalist and a New York Times Notable Book. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Ploughshares, Zoetrope and were included in The Best American Short Stories 2000 and 2004.

Several of her works have been read on NPR’s Selected Shorts. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Magazine, The American Prospect, Essence, O, The Believer and Salon.

Packer is a contributor to the Huffington Post. She has appeared as a guest commentator on NPR’s Talk of the Nation and MSNBC. Her talents garnered her a Guggenheim Fellowship and she was recently named one of America’s
Young Innovators by Smithsonian Magazine. Granta, the British literary magazine, named her one of America’s best young novelists.